Research Abstract: Ecocriticism and "Real" Nature

[Blake's Abstract #3]

Phillips, Dana. “Ecocriticism, Literary Theory, and the Truth of Ecology.” New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation 30.3 (1999): 577-602. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 30 June 2011.

Dana Phillips explores how an ecocritical approach which focuses on real nature as opposed to representational nature is actually unproductive.  Simply focusing on real nature results in a dismissal of the fact that nature is inextricably tangled with culture and that culture is inextricably tangled with nature.

Some scholars praise ecocriticism for abandoning abstract theory and focusing on actual, physical nature and activism.  However, Phillips states that excluding theory from the realm of ecocriticism, because poststructuralism argues that nature is a construction of culture, is unproductive. This dismissal of theory misses many ways that it could be used to aid the ecocritical cause, for example destabilizing the canon.  Instead of research and an understanding of criticism, this dismissal of theory is based upon the unfounded claim that theory is destructive to society.  Phillips also charges some ecocritics with being too ignorant of recent developments in the science of ecology.  He says ecocritics who cite the orderly, unified ecosystem a justification for their moral values ignore the new ecological theory that nature should be viewed as separate patches, which are constantly changing and reacting to stimuli.  Phillips notes that when viewing ecology in light of this new paradigm it actually has similarities with poststructuralist theories.

Specifically, Phillips examines Laurence Buell’s Ecocritical Imagination in order to reveal some problems with an antitheoretical ecocritical approach.  Buell engages with theory only to dismiss the idea that nature in literature is simply a product of ideology.  He argues that nature in literature can connect the reader with “real,” non-simulated, non-ideological nature, which allows the ecocritic to make a positive environmental impact by working with literature. 

Phillips disagrees with Buell that nature can be free from ideology; he asserts that theory should be used as a resource to further the ecocritical cause.  The weakness in Buell’s argument is that he ignores that nature an culture are intertwined when he attempts to only look at “actual” nature in texts.  A critical obsession with the realistic portrayal of nature in literature leaves ecocritics acting as mere judges of accurate representation. 

Buell attempts to claim that because A Field Guide to the Birds can put readers in contact with real nature literary representation of nature function in the same manner.  Phillips says that Buell does not support his claim and doubts the ability of the images of birds in field guide to connect humans with actual nature.  He explains that the guide acknowledges that the drawings of the birds are reduced and stylized for identifying purposes; the images are not the only aid used to identify a bird; the guide was developed with the assistance of birdwatchers for functionality, while literature is not written by readers; the guide may not allow positive identification of a bird. In short, instead of using theory to support his claims Buell relies on the argument that literary devices work to enhance a reader’s engagement with real nature, an argument that Phillips is able to weaken and make a case for using theory in all ecocriticism.  

Madam Knight’s Journey: Bad Rivers, Spangled Skies & Terrifying Darkness (Short Paper)

[Jay Jay]

Madam Knight’s Journey: Bad Rivers, Spangled Skies & Terrifying Darkness

I have tentatively chosen Sarah Kemble Knight’s The Private Journal of a Journey from Boston to New York for the focus of my conference paper in the hopes that I will discover ecofeminist characteristics within the text not yet discussed by early American scholars.  The journal was written from 1704—1705 and existed in manuscript form until 1825 when Theodore Dwight published it.  Knight records her journey from Boston, Massachusetts to New Haven, Connecticut with a side trip to New York along what is described by Sargent Bush, Jr. as a “rustic” but “increasingly well traveled” road (69).  The road from Boston to New Haven is traveled in five days, but Knight does not return to Boston right away, wintering in Connecticut for almost five months.  Knight’s experience with rural America provides modern readers with a fascinating glimpse into an America caught between the Massachusetts Bay Colony foundation and the American Revolution (70).

Modern readers are not the only audience that has benefited from her writing: Knight’s record of her absence from Boston “was written not for publication but for the amusement of a private circle of relatives and friends” (74).  In 1825 Dwight published the manuscript and shortly after, the manuscript his transcription is based upon was destroyed, leaving scholars with no original source for comparison.  Bush, Jr. reminds us that the reclaiming of Knight by Dwight is important because Dwight and his contemporaries were attempting to establish an American literary tradition and heritage (78-9).  The 1820s coincide with the creation of the myth of the American wilderness, spearheaded by James Fenimore Cooper, and Knight’s journal showcases the contrast between urban and rural America of 1704—1705.  The last lines of Dwight’s introduction are evidence of the transformation from rural frontier to urban landscape in one hundred and twenty years:

Over that tract of country where she travelled about a fortnight, on horseback, under the direction of a hired guide, with frequent risks of life and limb, and sometimes without food or shelter for many miles, we proceed at our ease, without exposure and almost without fatigue, in a day and a half, through a well peopled land, supplied with good stage-coaches and public houses, or the still greater luxuries of the elegant steam boats which daily traverse our waters. (86)

The landscape is spoken of in terms of transformation, from an empty and dangerous wilderness to a peopled and heavily traveled land that has been conquered, subdued and tamed.  Replication of Knight’s hazardous journey is no longer available to those living in Boston or New Haven of the 1820s.

Weekly Reading Response #1

[Jay Jay]

Buell, Lawrence.  The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture.  Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1995.  Print.

Chapters read:

• “Introduction”
• “Pastoral Ideology”
• “New World Dreams and Environmental Actualities”
• “Representing the Environment”

In the introduction, Buell outlines three broad topics his book, The Environmental Imagination, will cover: environmental perception, the place of nature in the history of Western thought, and the consequences of imagining a more “ecocentric” way of being (1).  While we’re not reading the entire book, the sections that we’ve selected did an excellent job of covering a little bit of each of these three topics.  Rather than go through the chapters point by point, I’ll be pulling out the highlights that grabbed my attention.

Buell speaks about “environmental double-think” in America, illustrating the ways in which Americans and our culture is both nature-loving and resource-consuming at the same time (4).  We are able to enact these two contrasting ways of life because we compartmentalize our actions.  I’m sure each of us could provide examples of this environmental double-think from our own personal lives.  For example, my washer and dryer is certified energy efficient, but I’ll toss something in the dryer for 5 minutes to de-wrinkle instead of ironing it, which would be way more energy efficient.

What I loved about Buell’s book is the historical aspect; Buell provides a history of American literature in order to expose and explain the relationships that have been built between literature, theory, genre, and the environment.  The construction of American literature has actually occurred three times, something that to be honest, I had given very little thought about.  Buell describes the three constructions as follows: constructed in the image of old world desire, reconstructed in the image of American cultural nationalism, and finally, reconstructed in the image of American exceptionalism (5-6).  The idea of, and construction of American literature did not happen in a vacuum, and we must take into account influences from Europe.

Buell provides four criteria of an environmental text, describing it as a “rough” check list.  I’m including it here because I think it will be an invaluable tool for Blake and I throughout this course in identifying appropriate primary texts.

1. The nonhuman environment is present not merely as a framing device but as a presence that begins to suggest that human history is implicated in natural history.
2. The human interest is not understood to be the only legitimate interest.
3. Human accountability to the environment is part of the text’s ethical orientation.
4. Some sense of the environment as a process rather than as a constant or a given is at least implicit in the text.

As you can see, the list is rather short and it also illustrates, as Buell points out, how inclusive or exclusive the idea of “environmental” as a category can be.  It would be a mistake to say that all of an author’s works automatically fall within the category of environmental text—instead, scholars must look at an author’s works one by one and decide on an individual basis whether or not it meets enough of the above criteria.

The double-edged sword of new world pastoral writing: How do we truly “see” nature? (Weekly Reading Response #1)

As I sit down to write my findings for this week, I had to fight the urge to walk two blocks down and take pictures of the Crane family that frequents the retention pond near my apartments.  I am pretty sure they are Snadhill Cranes, and the little brown baby that stands only half the height of his parents’ legs is adorable. 

After writing this post, I had to go out and snap a shot of the crane family (http://www.allaboutbirds.org/ says they form mated pairs).  I was excited to find that there are actually two babies.  I worry about them living so close to a busy street, but aparently they have a long fossil record.  The crane family was across the street from their normal pond looking for what might be bugs, roots, or worms to snack on. 

Does it matter what humans call the animals around us? Certainly not to the animals.  So, it is harmless then for humans to use the power of language to name, divide, and classify the natural worlds around us—well, not really.  Buell describes the genre of New World pastoral writing as prose that “promotes the idea of vast territories of the actual globs subsisting under the sign of nature” (54).  This again sounds like a harmless thought that might even inspire ecocritical thought.  We live in nature.  However Buell says New World pastoral writing also, “lays the groundwork for developing the myth of the land as properly unspoiled, a myth that can give shape and impetus to more recent environmental restoration projects” (54).  Buell goes on to say that “contemporary new world pastoralists,” or modern environmentalists are challenged by needing to overcome this myth, the “green world, a dream, a concept” (55).   Basically, the danger of new world pastoral is that the colonizers of early America used it to describe the American landscape as a form of cultural capital, and this lead to the writers not seeing the actual environment that was there but instead what they imagined was there; Buell calls this “the aesthetics of the not-there” (68). 

Laura commented on my post from last week that it seems like William Bartram never actually saw the gators that he sketched.  I think her instincts were right on.  Bartram, who Buell says was writing settler pastoral travel non-fiction, imposed his imagined green dream on the landscape and his dragon-like vision emerged. 

There is a doubled edged-sword that seems to characterize new world pastoral writing though.  The writers are appreciating nature and lauding its beauty, but because they are looking at the world through colonizers’ eyes they see new lands as “empty” and ready to be filled by their classifications and interpretations.  The world is non-existent until the colonizer looks upon it and names it. 

Photo of William Bartram's drawing “View of the Alegator [sic] Hole,” 1790. Bartram’s note:

“Location of this sink was near the ancient Indian village and trading station of Talahasochte”

Image from www.floridamemory.com

So, yes writers like Bartram appreciate nature, but they are trapped in the colonizer’s ideology.  Bartram thought he was doing a good thing by categorizing and naming the Florida fauna, flora, and animals, but wasn’t he just colonizing it with his words?  Buell says that Bartram’s Travels in Florida, “is conquest in the guise of passive observation” (62).  I am not sure I would describe killing alligators as passive.  I still need to read the full text to make my final judgment.  Does Bartram kill other animals because they were in his way?  Buell mentions a snake that he had to kill, but I get the feeling that scholars who view Bartram as a one of the more sensitive, eco-friendly early American travel writers have excused some of his behavior toward nature because he was writing trapped in the colonial ideology.  But why excuse him and make excuses?      

I have personally been sucked in by the modern pastoral myth of a sublime, pure, green world unspoiled by humans.  However, I am beginning to try to see the “real” nature beyond this modern environmental rhetoric—though if it convinces people to be more responsible I am not sure it is a bad thing like Buell seems to suggest.  Is the crane family any less “natural” or pure because they like to fish and nest in the local retention pond?  I don’t think so. 

The retention pond that the crane family frequents most often.  They also like the park across the street and another pond next to a Walgreens.

This brings me back to Bartram and his Alligators.  I was surprised as I read more of Buell that he uses Bartram’s text as an example of early American non-conquest oriented pastoral writing. He claims, “Bartram’s excitement by the sense that the country in which he finds himself really seems like a pastoral Eden (despite mosquitoes and alligators) converts his intellectual ambitiousness into a defense of the region’s integrity, not an apologia for conquest” (63).  Buell focuses on how Bartram describes the Creeks and Seminoles with the same respect as the while settlers.  Ok, I see that, but what about how he describes the land, the animals?  He seems to have that “man is greater than nature; so, I have a right to be master of it” attitude.  Buell offers Bartram’s non-conquest pastoral writing and ingenious pastoral writing (used “as a weapon against cultural dominance” as alternate examples to the colonizing potential of new world pastoral writing.  I am just not ready to accept this until I explore the text more.  I fell that Bartram has an instrumentalist attitude (nature is to be used as an instrument for man’s benefit) that needs to be acknowledged.  I am not sure what this means for the text as a whole, or how scholars should look at new world pastoral writing differently.

Oryx and Crake Tangent

While reading Buell, I could not help but think of Oryx and Crake.  I have a feeling this will happen often because I spent last semester writing three lengthy papers on the novel and giving two presentations on it.  Anyway, I am now convinced that Crake’s problem is that despite his mathematical, scientific mind he wholeheartedly believes in a green dream, of nature unspoiled by humans and that is why he is driven to do what he does (I won’t give spoilers).  Also, I think this is why he insisted that the “perfect” humans that he created should all have green eyes.  It is a symbolic gesture—a  message that he wants them to see the world with green sight.     

Actually, I Felt Sorry for the Gator.

While reading Jay Jay's post about our first ecocritical brainstorming session, I realized that I am also interested in studying this theoretical approach because I feel that it can provide a lens to view the travel journals that I have read in a new perspective and perhaps answer some of my many questions about them.  Like Jay Jay, my primary research interest is in early American studies, and I am curious to see what I can discover about these texts by applying ecofeminist theory to them. 

I wonder, where does the simultaneous American love and abuse of nature that Lawrence Buell describes originate?

I took my first course in early American literature as an undergraduate.  One of the travel narratives that I read struck me because I was not sure what to make of it; my survey class did not offer much time to deconstruct it. I am referring to William Bartram's Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida.  I was intially excited to read this because I am from Jacksonville, Florida, near the St. John's River where Bartram describes an encounter with alligators.  Growing up, I wondered why there were schools and places named after someone "Bartram."  As I read this travel journal, I anticipated finding the great deeds that he had done to receive this honor.

Copy of title page of 1792 reprint for J. Johnson. First published Philadelphia, 1791.
Image from Florida Photgraphic Collection at http://www.floridamemory.com/

I learned that Bartram was a Quaker naturalist and botanist whose stories and sketches of Early American wilderness inspired writers  such as Coleridge and Wordsworth.  Unfortunately, I was dismayed by Bartram's description of a violent brush with alligators while fishing on the St. Johns River, which ends in him shooting a gator that climbs onto the shore after he pulls his canoe onto the dry ground.

This text was disturbing to me because as a peaceful Quaker, botanist, and naturalist I did not understand why would Bartram be so aggressive with these creatures.  Yes, he might have been in danger is they attacked him, but he invaded their swamp to fish.  He also mentions that for the most part they did not molest him.  He even seems to take pride in shooting the large gator at the end even though he is not threatening.

It puzzles me that the introduction in The American Tradition in Literature, edited by George Perkins and Barbara Perkins, describes Bartram as only killing large animals "if hard pressed" (271).  From the brief excerpt from his journal, I see an early example of the current contradictory American "love" for nature, which disappears the moment nature is in between us and what we want. 

Like Bartram beating the gators in the head with an oar to get to a good fishing spot, even today Americans will move endangered Joshua trees in the high desert to build the latest development of identical suburban homes. So, what does Bartram's travel journal mean through an ecofeminist lens?  Can we say that it is one of the sites of the origin of dualistic relationship to nature? Perkins et al. assert that this text, "helped fix in European minds pictures of an American wilderness lush and untamed . . .it depicted a world both inviting and threatening" (271).

First, I need to see what other scholars have said about this text.  Second, I need to learn more about the origin of this text, and about the impact on its readers.  Yes, the text was widely published in London, but how long was it in print for? Who read it? Could it have contributed to the American view of the wilderness as the enemy of humans, or was this imported from England and simply reinforced by texts such as these?  Is Bartram really the naturalist hero who deserves to have schools and parks named after him, or does this text show a darker side?  Did he "other" the Florida wilderness in such a manner that contributed to the othering of the natives that would eventually be rooted in the American perception of the wilderness?

I pulled up a photo of Bartram's drawing of alligators in the St. Johns River and I was surprised that they looked almost like dragons.  What does this drawing say about how the gators looked in his eyes?  What bearing does it have on the text?  I will need to think about this more.

Photo of William Bartram's Sketch of Two Alligators in the St. Johns River, 1773 or 1774.  Image from Florida Photographic Collection at http://www.floridamamory.com/

Bartram's notes with the sketch:

Figure 1 represents the action of this terrible monster when they bellow in the Spring Season. They force the water out of their throat which falls from their mouth like a Cataract and a steam or vapour from their nostrils like smoke.

Figure 2 represents them rising up out of the water when they devour the fish. From the standpoint of natural history, perhaps the most important drawing ever executed by Bartram.

Well, like the female student that Nina Bayam describes as feeling sorry for the lion killed in Ernest Hemingway's The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, I admit to feeling sorry for the gator that Bartram shot.  It is this dissonance in the text that disturbed me and sparked my curiosity.

Until next time, don't go fishing where there are alligators. 

Blake